Sculpture (Sculpture)

tombs and ignitions is a collaborative ceramic sculpture by artists Tyler Cross and Kyle Lypka. The work was translated by Kyle Lypka from Tyler Cross’s original drawing into three dimensions by coil building upwards. Lypka chose to coil build instead of using slabs because, although very flat and geometric, he believed that the form would benefit from the more organic technique of coil building, which after drying and firing tends to twist and pull, adding a sort of paradoxical swing and motion to the work’s angularity.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Julio Cesar Morales’s watercolor drawings, Undocumented Intervention , show a variety of surprising hiding places assumed by people trying to cross into the United States without documentation. Morales drew inspiration from both his childhood near the United States-Mexico border as well as from photographic documentation on U. S. government websites.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Based on historical prophecies and fantasy, the artist creates apocalyptic scenarios that posit an enigmatic world plagued by social, political, and environmental upheaval. Untitled (Set of Six Drawings) (2012) is an intricate watercolor of a child sitting cross-legged with its head stuck inside a giant mask resembling a duck head covered with eyes. It looks like a scene snatched from science fiction or a surreal dream; it is tempting to see in it some kind of warning sign, or an ominous vision of the future.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

After being cast, the resulting resin block used in JCA-25-SC was cut into thin slices obtaining a series of rectangular shapes that resemble ceramic tiles. Usually displayed in grid against the wall or in a corner, the viewer is able to follow the sequence of cross sections to visually recreate the work’s genesis. In this way, Caesar’s pieces embody an interesting x-ray or archaeology of the artistic process itself.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

escenario chacana by Claudia Martínez Garay is a sculptural work composed of a frame-like structure that contains a series of ceramic pieces. It references the Chakana, an Andean cross that encompasses the different levels of existence (known as Pachas) and sacred elements contained in the Indigenous cosmologies of the region. It often appears in the geometrical motifs of textiles and ceramics.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Jessie Stead’s Punched Interlude works are made out of found police barricade tape that she punches holes in and then runs through a music box, the music is composed by her as audible reflection on barricades and no go zones throughout the city of New York in area of Donald Trump. The music box is attached to a gum ball machine globe which acts as a resonator, amplifying the music that results from the punched holes.

Photography (Photography)

“Other photographers used to send me negatives of cross-eyed people, asking me to retouch them. I used to scratch out the emulsion where the pupil is, and draw another one right next to it.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948.

Painting (Painting)

Untitled (Bubbles) by Natan Lawson is produced by a marker with a ball-bearing tip, which is drained and refilled with a new color of acrylic paint for each layer. Untitled (Bubbles) is the result of collaging layers of imagery in the computer, before sending coordinates to the plotter which renders it, with some manual intervention of the canvas. Lawson thinks of the process as related to a computerized jacquard loom, where colors are woven and layered.

Photography (Photography)

In this photographic series, Yto Barrada was interested in the logos of the buses that travel between North Africa and Europe. They become like abstract paintings that recall Modernist formal experimentation. They are somehow symptomatic of the circulation of goods and people that is made to sound so abstract.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Burrito Bay is a video by George Kuchar that follows the format of a diary or travelogue centered on a tropical trip to Acapulco, Mexico. The footage was filmed during the production of Tropical Vulture , a cross-generational collaborative project between George Kuchar and his then student, Mexican artist Miguel Calderón. The video strays away from the conventions of documentary: Kuchar adds an array of effects such as fadeouts between scenes, overlaid digital shapes traversing across the frame, and a strange, unexpected soundtrack.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The year 2016 is organized like a telephone book; the data corresponding to the contributions are classified in alphabetical order by the name of the donor. With this database as well as other types of information, the 900-page book presents a material representation of the scale of the cross over between cultural philanthropy and the financing of political campaigns in America. It also provides an unprecedented resource for discovering the political leaning of the museum sector.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tropical Vulture is a cross-generational project which highlights the artistic influences between George Kuchar, a Bay Area legend of independent filmmaking, and Mexican artist Miguel Calderón. Conversations with a Tropical Vulture is an experimental narrative video, co-directed by both artists, and blends Hollywood glamour and drama with an all-too-real life approach, which creates and inspires a counterpoint of unattainable desire against unbearable actuality. The video, shot on location in Acapulco, utilizes a “lo-fi” aesthetic and playful use of non-professional actors.

Painting (Painting)

In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point. Calling up the unknown intimacies of these objects, McMillian upends their usual orientation, placing them directly on the wall to serve as paintings, rather than covers. Layering over the repurposed textiles with hardware store paint, McMillian transforms the sheets into canvases, creating abstract landscapes on top of the traces of human bodies intact in the fabric.

Installation (Installation)

Part of a series entitled “Looking at Listening”, 2011, the piece invited the spectator to experiment and consider sound as a kinetic and synesthetic process, where multiple experiences and senses can cross. The presented photographs were selected from the New York Public Library and found in an archive called ‘Listening,’ with the sub-genres ‘town meetings,’ ‘investigation,’ ‘audiences 1960–1970’ and ‘conversation.’ Taking the photographs from the city’s archive of frozen moments of audio exchange, Arakawa and Tcherepnin give sound and movement back to past moments. In each of the photographs, people are listening in different situations—public, and private.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Wolowiec’s textile work Not This Time (2015) translates pixelated images into sensuous fabric and ink based forms that are at once beautiful in their abstraction and anxiety-ridden in their visualization of a malfunctioning digital world. In order to produce this work, Wolowiec selects a grouping of digital images from web-based sources that have a glitch, an aberration in which a short-lived technical fault results in distortions in an image’s display. Through a dye sublimination ink process, the images are printed onto strands of thread pixel by pixel, which the artist then weaves into a final work.

Photography (Photography)

Kastura (2012) is an installation consisting of 24 black-and-white photographs of the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto bequeathed by Kimura’s grandfather; free-standing structures on which they are hung; and ornamental plants. The photographs appear to have been taken in late 1950s soon after tours of the villa were first offered to the public. Then, as today, visitors were led by a guide and could only follow a designated route.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights. The protesters and their supporters carried signs and wore t-shirts whose messages are highlighted in the drawings. However, in them, Bowers isolates the images of the protesters from the multitude that surrounds them in the original photographs, and, therefore amplifies their messages.

Installation (Installation)

In Permanent Laughter (2011), dozens of portable compasses are scattered under a sheet of acrylic board, which is in turned covered with what appear to be the diffuse remains of an unidentified skeleton. Often combining a sense of physical incongruity and visceral displeasure with touches of humor and cruelty, Taiyo utilizes conceptual approaches as a means of challenging preconceived ideas about social organization. His work frequently interrogates how we organize space and time through discretely measured units, and in parodying that obsessively precise ways that we mark our very existence – through instruments that direct our bodily movements or denote our sense of time – Taiyo invites us to consider our relationship not just to devices but to our very sense of ontological being.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Haunted by You documents Taiyo Kimura’s struggle to use a record player, satirizing the normal actions of everyday life in order to question the meanings that underlie ordinary modes of living. The performance narrative unfolds upon the circular movements of the turntable. A chicken’s leg replaces the turntable’s arm.

Photography (Photography)

Awol Erizku’s image Origin of Afro-Esotericism has compositional force and a rhythmic use of full-blast color. In the image are five faces each with varying modes of representation. One of them is “Aunt Jemima” (recently renamed Pearl Milling Company), a brand that appropriated a character from a late 19th century minstrel show.

Installation (Installation)

On September 22, 1940 the French signed an accord, which granted Japanese troops the right to occupy Indochina. The Japanese presence in Indochina lasted until the end of World War II and during the occupation, jute supplies from India were interrupted. Jute was used to make sacks as well as gunpowder, a crucial material for the war industry.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Vertical Horizon by Wito Wibowo addresses a media scandal in 2010 that took over the cultural milieu of Indonesia. Someone uploaded on a sextape of pop star Ariel Peterpan with model-actress Luna Maya recorded on a mobile phone. Several days later, another video of Ariel Peterpan and Cut Tari, an infotainment news presenter in Indonesia, surfaced on the Internet.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The Wings by Pichet Piaklin is a creation story of fragility, where the desire for freedom is mired in blood red by the inculcation of faith and violence. Piaklin was born and continues to live and work in Thailand’s deep south, a geographical area once known as the Pattani Kingdom (now the Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat provinces), before it was annexed by the Siam Kingdom in the early 1900s. As a consequence of unreconciled historical conflict, this predominantly Muslim community continues to endure oppressive social and political conditions under the ruling Thai Buddhist monarchy.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Manuel Correa’s documentary Four Hundred Unquiet Graves is a powerful and vulnerable visual essay about the descendants of those who were disappeared during the Spanish Civil War from 1936–1939. The film reveals the spectrum of violence that surrounds the war, namely the impact of thousands of forced disappearances on different generations. Surviving family members are haunted not only by the absence of their grandparents, but also by the overwhelming grief that lives in their parents.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism is part of a three project lineage, following Bahar Noorizadeh’s research on the architecture of the Soviet Union. The video focuses on the peculiar story of the Russian architect Moisei Ginzburg, who, in the late 1920s, suddenly turned his back on Le Corbusier, the French father of urbanist modernism. While Ginzburg had been a fervent follower of Le Corbusier’s philosophy, the story says that he was converted to disurbanism in only half an hour by the urban sociologist Mikhail Okhitovich.

Photography (Photography)

In Stilleben mid Zierlauch ( Still Life with Aluminum) Annette Kelm utilizes visual juxtaposition to bring together a gridded aluminum backdrop, a pot with a vaguely indigenous pattern on it, and two purple dandelions. The aesthetic dissonance between the mechanical, gridded aluminum and the grainy clay pot signify an interaction between systems of visual production, furthered by the aluminum grid’s inward tilt, visually apparent due to the grid pattern’s convergence at the top of the photograph. Contrasting the stark slant of the grid, the pot sits on a level surface, while the two tall stems protruding from it run at a non-parallel angle to the grid.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

After Scarcity is a sci-fi video-essay that tracks Soviet cyberneticians (1950s – 1980s) in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy. If history at its best is a blueprint for science-fiction, revisiting contingent histories of economic technology might enable an access to the future. Vindicating this other internet , the work presents the economic application of socialist cybernetic experiments as extraordinary to financial arrangements and imaginations of our time.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

HFT The Gardener/Diagrams exemplifies Suzanne Treister’s interest in esoterica , cybernetic awareness and hallucinatory aesthetics as an emanation and contrast to the real world through the exploring circulations of power. Her fictional character Hillel Fischer Traumberg — a banker turned ‘outsider artist’ — is a HFT, a High Frequency Trader. The character is also a contemporary vision of HCE, the hero of James Joyce in Finnegans Wake , who struggles to wake up in the tumult of dissolving boundaries between art, nature, language, money, mathematics and the trauma of history.

Painting (Painting)

Jarrett Key’s practice combines several modes of production into a single frame, incorporating sculpture, painting, and performance. Dancing Free I , painted in wet cement, like a fresco, is part of a current series of paintings titled Leaving the City , which depicts Black people they know in lush, pastoral landscapes. Raised in rural Alabama, Key’s series grew out of a few experiments conducted with visitors to their studio.

Photography (Photography)

Erin Shirreff’s A. P. series of prints investigates how objects are “constructed” at the level of the image. For each composite photograph, Shirreff fabricates two sculptural forms from what appear to be metal or plaster, although the precise materials are unidentified. Her sculptures resemble miniature architectural models or renderings of buildings as-yet-to-be fully conceptualized, both elemental and elegant in their use of sharp angles and clean lines.